BG Reads | News You Need to Know (November 3, 2021)
Downtown Austin
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Austin voters strongly reject Prop A, which would have required hiring hundreds more police (KUT)
Austin voters have rejected a local ballot measure that would have required the police department to hire hundreds more officers.
More than 67% of people who voted came out against Proposition A, according to preliminary voting results. The measure would have required the Austin Police Department to staff at least 2 officers per every 1,000 residents. Given current employment numbers, Austin would have had to hire anywhere from 300 to 700 officers over the next year, according to city estimates.
Prop A opponents argued that the cost of hiring this many officers could be devastating to the city’s budget. The City of Austin’s Budget Office estimated that Prop A could have cost the city anywhere from $54 million to about $120 million a year, for at least the first five years. (An estimate from the group behind Prop A was much lower, coming in at about $35 million a year.)
While yard signs distributed by the “No Way on Prop A” campaign suggested the city would have to cut funding for parks and libraries to afford more police, it was unclear prior to the election where exactly the money would come from.
But as it became clear Tuesday night that Prop A had no chance of passing, the money was no one's job to worry about. Instead, opponents of Prop A said Austin's rejection of the measure was proof that residents are in favor of recent efforts to make changes within the city's police department.
“Austin answered overwhelmingly tonight. We believe in criminal justice reform. We believe in comprehensive public safety and creating a better city,” Austin City Council Member Greg Casar told KUT. “Tonight’s results show that Austinites have rejected right-wing division and are marching forward to progressive change.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Approval of Prop B allows for potential land swap between city, Oracle (Austin Monitor)
Voters strongly approved a ballot proposal Tuesday that allows the city to begin the process of trading a small piece of parkland for a much larger parcel, along with receiving other significant financial commitments from technology company Oracle, which recently relocated its headquarters to Austin.
As of late Tuesday night, Proposition B was winning with 87,152 votes in favor to 31,664 votes against. Voter approval was required for the proposed deal because the public has to OK any transfer of parkland, in this case 9 acres on South Lakeshore Boulevard that currently serve as the home of a maintenance complex for the Parks and Recreation Department.
The Oracle campus sits just to the west of the park property that is expected to be used for the company to expand its local footprint.
Per the ballot proposal, in return the eventual recipient of the parkland would have to give the city 48 acres of waterfront land that has to be next to a current public park; pay for or build a new maintenance facility for PARD on a different piece of city land; and partially or fully pay for the removal of the maintenance facility at Fiesta Gardens and its restoration to parkland.
The 48-acre property identified to complete the deal, which will soon be put out for a request for bids, is located inside John Treviño Jr. Metropolitan Park and is currently the location of Driveway Austin Motorsports. The bidder for the parkland would need to have that parcel under contract for the deal to be considered for completion… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Pike Powers, power broker and pioneer of Austin's tech sector, dies at 80 (Austin American-Statesman)
Longtime Austin lawyer and business leader Pike Powers, one of the pioneers of Austin’s technology sector, has died, his family said. He was 80.
Powers was a key economic strategy leader for Austin since 1983, when he helped drive the community effort to land the MCC computer research consortium. He was involved in recruiting efforts for 3M, Sematech, Applied Materials and Samsung Semiconductor Austin.
Powers was a leader in creating Texas technology initiatives established in 2002 to redefine and reinvigorate the collaboration among government, academia and private industry. In response to that strategy, the state of Texas created a $295 million Texas Enterprise Fund in 2003 and the Emerging Technology Fund in 2005.
Former state Sen. Kirk Watson, who served as Austin mayor from 1997 to 2001, said Austin is what it is in 2021 in large part because of the work Powers did to put the city on the map.
"Pike Powers knew how to get things done," Watson said.
"If you look at the major successes in Austin becoming a focal point in the worldwide information and knowledge economy, transforming from a college town where state government was the dominant part of the economy, Pike Powers was involved in one way or another," Watson said.
In a statement, Powers' family said, "Our deep loss is shared by our community. Our husband and father was a visionary who never turned down a request for help and could see decades into the future. He was adored by family, friends and strangers too. He leaves behind an unmistakable impression on us and on the great state of Texas."… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Abortion providers and gun rights advocates are “strange bedfellows” in fight to strike down Texas’ new abortion law (Texas Tribune)
Abortion-rights advocates have found an unexpected ally in their fight to overturn Texas’ controversial abortion law: gun rights advocates, fearful that the same novel mechanism employed to enforce the statute could later be applied to infringe on gun ownership.
That issue played a key role in oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, where justices discussed how Texas’ method of implementing its abortion law could put other constitutional rights at risk.
The concern was first introduced in court by the Firearms Policy Coalition, a California-based nonprofit that advocates and defends gun rights laws nationally. The group authored an amicus brief — a type of filing offering information to the court but provided by an entity that isn’t a party to the case — in support of abortion providers, who presented arguments before the high court to block Texas’ abortion restriction law, commonly referred to as Senate Bill 8.
“If Texas’s scheme for postponing or evading federal judicial review is successful here, it will undoubtedly serve as a model for deterring and suppressing the exercise of numerous constitutional rights,” Erik S. Jaffe, a lawyer for the group, wrote in the brief. “New York is already experimenting with private enforcement of anti-gun laws and will no doubt gladly incorporate the lessons of this case to insulate its future efforts to suppress the right to keep and bear arms.”
Six Supreme Court justices stressed the same point Monday — and the lead attorney defending Texas affirmed that he believed the method could indeed be used in laws targeting other rights.
Melissa Murray, a professor at the New York University School of Law, called gun rights advocates’ support for abortion providers a case of “strange bedfellows.”
“It’s like, ‘Today it’s abortion, tomorrow it’s us,’” she said. “I’m sure they see the writing on the wall — if this can happen in Texas, what’s to stop California from doing something on the Second Amendment?”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Republican John Lujan wins special election runoff to flip Texas House seat in San Antonio (Texas Tribune)
Republican John Lujan has won the special election runoff for Texas House District 118, flipping the Democratic-friendly seat in San Antonio.
The victory by Lujan gives Republicans an early win in their drive to make new inroads in South Texas after President Joe Biden underperformed there last year.
With all vote centers reporting Tuesday night, Lujan was leading Democrat Frank Ramirez 51.2% to 48.8%, according to unofficial results. Lujan briefly held the seat in 2016, while Ramirez is a former staffer for the San Antonio City Council and at the Texas Legislature.
"I'm a blessed man to win this for the second time, and to be the only Republican ever to win this seat, I think, is really important for us down here," Lujan told The Texas Tribune as he left his election night party. He called his victory part of a "big movement ... for conservatism" in the Hispanic community.
Ramirez conceded in a statement.
"We didn’t make it over the line tonight," he said. "But we gave Texas Republicans a run for their money at every single step."
Lujan will replace former state Rep. Leo Pacheco, D-San Antonio, who resigned earlier this year to teach at San Antonio College… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax: ‘I don’t have much joy in my life’ (D Magazine)
The current version of City Manager T.C. Broadnax does not make it easy to write about his public appearances away from City Hall. In a Q&A at Downtown Dallas Inc.’s annual luncheon on Thursday, Broadnax spoke broadly about downtown but somehow left a Sheraton ballroom of about 300 business owners, developers, public officials, and downtown denizens no more enlightened about the city’s most important neighborhood and his plans for it than they were half an hour before he took the stage. The city’s top executive either could not nor would not name a favorite downtown restaurant — “wherever my staff tells me,” he said — and his favorite downtown memory was of something he’d done recently, when he and his wife visited the Exchange Food Hall at AT&T’s Discovery District. “I don’t have much joy in my life,” he said, apparently not joking but nonetheless cracking up the room. I am being hard on Broadnax. He stepped in to replace Mayor Eric Johnson, who had come down with a breakthrough case of COVID-19. (He writes that he is recovering well. And tweeting.)… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Zillow quits home-flipping business, cites inability to forecast prices (Wall Street Journal)
Real-estate firm Zillow Group is exiting the home-flipping business, saying on Tuesday that its algorithmic model to buy and sell homes rapidly doesn’t work as planned. The firm’s termination of its tech-enabled home-flipping business, known as “iBuying,” follows Zillow’s Oct. 18 announcement that it was halting all new home purchases for the rest of the year. At the time, Zillow pointed to labor and supply shortages for its inability to renovate and flip houses fast enough. But Chief Executive Rich Barton said Tuesday that Zillow had failed to accurately predict the pace of home-price appreciation, marking an end to a venture the company once said could generate $20 billion a year.
“We’ve determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated and continuing to scale Zillow Offers would result in too much earnings and balance-sheet volatility,” Mr. Barton said in a statement. Zillow’s share price was down about 12% in late trading on Tuesday, but before it announced the decision to end home flipping. The move represents a big hit to Zillow’s top line. Home-flipping was the company’s largest source of revenue, but it has never turned a profit. Zillow, which will release earnings later on Tuesday, said it would report that its home-flipping business, Zillow Offers, lost $381 million last quarter, resulting in a combined loss of $169 million across all of Zillow. The company said it also plans to cut 25% of its workforce. Zillow has an inventory of more than 9,800 homes across the U.S. that it is currently shopping to investors. There are another 8,200 homes in contract it has agreed to buy. The company expects to lose somewhere between 5% and 7% on these homes, the company said. Starting in the summer, competitors such as OpenDoor and Offerpad began to pull back from home purchases in one of the biggest home-flipping markets, Phoenix, as the red-hot pandemic market began to cool… (LINK TO FULL STORY)